Stuff

Tonight’s YouGov poll for the Sun has topline figures of CON 32%, LAB 43%, LDEM 10%, UKIP 7%, so back to a Labour lead far more typical of YouGov’s recent polling than the fourteen point lead last night.

There is also a new Opinium poll out today, which also gives Labour an eleven point lead. Opinium’s full topline figures are CON 31%(nc), LAB 42%(nc), LDEM 8%(-1), UKIP 9%(+1). Changes are from Opinium’s last poll a fortnight ago and show no significant change.

211 Responses to “New YouGov and Opinium polls”

“Yes, capitalism does seem to be suicidal. It prefers to go careering off cliffs rather than run along nicely on regulated rails. Okay, the track is always going to be lightly greased somewhere along the line – but you’d think the financial services ‘industry’ would see that there needs to be some limits!”

You would think right? Other industries I’ve seen tend to understand the importance of self-regulation and getting rid of their worst excesses. All these professions out there keep themselves highly regulated because they don’t want bad people working in their field, doing bad things, and making everyone else in their profession suffer. This is very true of doctors and lawyers out there. We don’t want the Nick Riverias and Lionel Hutzes out there causing problems. The entertainment industry seems to get this too (they have ratings systems so that they can avoid regulation). The tech industry seems to get this too (putting in privacy settings and not taking advantage of their superior positions).

But the financial services industry seems to have a different attitude by and large and that is, we do whatever we want, whenever we want, to whomever we want however we want and wherever we want. And if we make mistakes, everyone else should simply support us, fix our mistake, worship us, and let us keep doing what we’re doing.

Another ‘spot on’ comment. An independent judiciary is one of the most important pillars of democracy.

The ICC is floundering because it has become overly political/ politicised. Many people who are interested in international law & justice are horrified by the on-going disaster which the PR-hungry ICC has become.
8-)

It touches on the, IMO, main problem without going into any depth or detail, unfortunately:

“Yet it is primarily the ICC’s reliance on evidence-gathering and witness sourcing by local NGOs and incumbent politicians that has put its credibility at stake.” is the paragraph to which I refer.

As it becomes ever more apparent that NGOs are, in fact, financed by governments or wealthy individuals with ‘views’ we are forced to speculate at how on-sided the evidence gathering is likely to be.

In the Scottish/ English/ US system, for all their faults, the police are at least supposed to be evidence gatherers who are duty bound to report all the evidence, including evidence favourable to the defence. No such duty binds governments or NGOs. Therefore there can be little doubt that both the defence & the prosecution receive the evidence which governments & NGOs want them to receive.

On another, related subject: The politics surrounding the proposed trial of Saif Gaddafi have escalated beyond anything seen so far. Google it, if you haven’t already. It really is outrageous.
8-)

Hugh Dowding was entirely responsible for developing the pre-war “Dowding system” of air defence, he was due to retire in June 1939, but stayed on, adopting a “Fabian strategy” to overcome the Luftwaffe.

He was a vegetarian, and campaigned against animal cruelty. He was a member of the Fairy Investigation Society and a Theosophist, but that was nothing out of the ordinary in the early 20C, positively pedestrian compared to the perverse “Grail” legends and bizarre esoteric practices favoured by German high command at the time.

He was also a leading light of the Tunbridge Wells UFO Society and gets a footnote in the Cedric Allingham story: